Page 8 of Last Letter Home
Yours,
Sarah
It was a well-judged letter, warm and deliberately cheerful, but a little distant, Briony thought when she’d finished. A letter between friends. September 1940. The Allies hadn’t arrived in Italy until 1943, of course, so Hartmann must have received it when he was elsewhere. It struck her that this meant he might have carried it around with him for several years. It must have been special to him.
Briony looked up to see Mariella’s eyes upon her, calm dark pools, but with a touch of trouble. ‘Please take them,’ Mariella said. ‘Maybe you find her family and give them.’
‘Maybe.’ Briony frowned. ‘I wonder who Paul Hartmann was.’ There was something about the voice of the letter she’d read, its vitality, and the lightness of the handwriting, that stirred her interest. She could almost imagine the writer sitting by a window with a view of an autumn garden, the air smelling of bonfire smoke, as her hand flew over the page.
‘Please.’ Mariella was pleading. ‘The film, these letters, they do not belong to us. You take them.’
‘But Mariella, if your father took them from the villa without permission, perhaps I shouldn’t have them. They don’t belong to either of us.’
To Briony’s surprise, Mariella drew herself up proudly, her dark eyes glinting. There was no sign of anxiety now in the stern line of her mouth, the firmness of her hands clutching the table edge. ‘Some people say he steal them, but I tell you the Villa Teresa belongs to my family,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ Briony said in surprise.
‘What happened in the war was important to my father. The young people, they say it was so long ago. What does anyone care now?’
‘I care,’ Briony said quietly.
‘Yes, so I tell you a little. The Villa Teresa belonged to the father of my grandfather, you understand?’
‘Your great-grandfather.’
‘Yes. But he die in the war and then my grandfather and the cousin of my grandfather both say the villa belongs to them. So, for many years they fight about it, until there is no more money to pay l’avvocato.’
‘The lawyer?’
‘Si. And then my grandfather die, some say of sadness. For many years, we do not know what will happen.’
‘But no one lives there now?’
‘No. The villa is falling down. No good.’ Mariella smoothed her hair and sighed. Then with the same quick movements that she used to fold linen, she straightened the pile of letters, pushed them back into the big envelope and shut them in the tin. ‘Take, take,’ she said, pushing the tin towards Briony.
It was apparently impossible to refuse and part of Briony didn’t want to. Whoever Sarah, the letter-writer, turned out to be – an acquaintance of her grandfather or otherwise – Briony was curious.
‘I can try to find her family, I suppose. If not, maybe I should give them to an archive? Museum,’ she explained hastily, seeing Mariella frown.
‘Yes, museum.’
She took the box. When she thanked Mariella, she was surprised when the woman embraced her warmly. Only as she made her way down the hillside did it occur to her that Mariella had not properly answered her questions, but instead raised new ones.
‘So the Villa Teresa was occupied by Allied troops during the invasion of Italy, but when the time came to give it back to its owners, Mariella’s great-grandfather had died and the family argued about who should inherit it,’ Briony explained to Luke and Aruna later that afternoon. She was sitting at the pool’s edge, her stripy sundress drawn up over her knees, swirling her feet in the water. ‘And the case has lain unresolved for years and years, the old people are all dead and no one knows what’s happening.’ The dolphin mosaic on the bottom of the pool wriggled and bucked.
‘The bureaucracy. Unbelievable!’ Luke’s teeth flashed in a sardonic grin. ‘It could only happen here.’ He was sitting on a sunlounger, a paperback splayed face down on his stomach. His body had already turned a pale gold in the sun.
‘That still doesn’t explain why Mariella gave us the film.’ Aruna, in her white bikini, gleamed darker than ever. She was sitting awkwardly on the sunbed next to Luke’s, examining a nasty blister on the side of her foot. ‘Damn these shoes,’ she muttered, wriggling her toes. ‘Bri, chuck me the suncream, will you?’
‘It’s not fair,’ Briony grumbled, obliging. ‘All I get is this boiled lobster look.’
‘You are a delicate English rose,’ Aruna agreed with a grin. Her sparkling nose jewel brought out the brilliance of her sharp brown eyes and a coiled snake tattoo on her ankle emphasized the delicacy of her bone structure.
Briony smiled back with fondness. Aruna was so slender and perfect it was no surprise that everyone fell for her. Luke was a case in point. Briony had been with Aruna when the couple had first met and she still remembered the besotted expression on his face the instant he set eyes on her friend.
‘You’re both gorgeous,’ Luke sighed. ‘Now go on with the story, Briony.’
‘Mariella’s family think of the villa as theirs and her father had taken the film and the letters away without asking anyone and she didn’t know what else to do with them.’
